A fellow artist and friend, Catherine Holcombe, was recently told that crayons are not an appropriate art medium for adults. This inspired the community of Society6 artists to take on the challenge of making artwork using crayons and the “Crayon Bomb Project” was created. The crayons could be used in a traditional manner to draw or in an unconventional manner, such as melting or photographing the crayons. The only guideline was that crayons needed to be an important part of the artwork. Over 50 artists participated. We were guided along the way by the talented Carina Povarchik. You can see a collection of the artwork on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/catru/crayon-love/

I’m so pleased with my crayon creation, titled “Aqua Feather”. I had so much fun creating it and intend to use crayon in future works. I love how unpredictable the melting was on the background and I felt very nostalgic when I was coloring the feather in the traditional coloring technique. It wasn’t too messy, so I was able to create when my kids were around and was able to involve them in the artistic process, too. Read below to see how it was done.

Choose a selection of crayon colors and have a place to keep your crayon pieces divided. Shave or crumble them into small pieces. A little really does go a long way for this project. I wanted coordinating shades of aqua, lime and turquoise with some black and white for extra contrast. My 6 year old chose a combination of pinks, reds and purples. (Both examples are shown below).

Cut a long sheet of wax paper; I used a sheet that was about 16″ long. Fold it in half. Protect the surface of your ironing board with more wax paper, an old sheet or a piece of cardboard. Place your folded wax paper on the ironing board and sprinkle the crayon bits on 1/2 of it. My 6 year old had fun helping me with this part. When you’re finished, fold the other half of the wax paper over and tape the 3 open edges down. This will close it and help prevent wax from melting out the sides.

It’s melting time! Set your iron to a LOW temperature because it doesn’t take much heat to melt the wax. You can protect your iron by putting an extra sheet of wax paper on top. Gently press down on the wax paper to melt the colors into each other. IMPORTANT: This step is for adults only. Children should NOT be handling the iron.

Let the wax cool completely before moving it off of the ironing board. Once it was cool, I taped the wax paper onto a window and took photos of it. You can also scan it, but you might want to put a transparency down to protect your scanner from crayon wax.

After I was pleased with my digital image from my melted wax, I started on my feather. It was drawn in crayon by hand using the same colored crayons as my melted creation. I then scanned the feather drawing at a high resolution and edited it in Adobe Photoshop to make it have a transparent background. I combined my two images in Photoshop and added a simple drop shadow to the feather to make it stand out from the background.

I hope you like my crayon project. It was so fun to create and reminded me that crayons are awesome. Grab a box and give it a try!